joi, 7 mai 2015

Nonetheless, I (like many others) felt a wrongness in the world, a wrongness that seeped through the cracks of my privileged, insulated childhood. I never fully accepted what I had been offered as normal. Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day. And as my horizons broadened, I knew that millions were not supposed to be starving, that nuclear weapons were not supposed to be hanging over our heads, that the rainforests were not supposed to be shrinking, or the fish dying, or the condors and eagles disappearing. I could not accept the way the dominant narrative of my culture handled these things: as fragmentary problems to be solved, as unfortunate facts of life to be regretted, or as unmentionable taboo subjects to be simply ignored.

luni, 4 mai 2015

Some things are beyond measure and beyond price. No amount
of money is enough to compensate for the loss of the sacred.

In case you were wondering whether the oceans are worth
protecting, the World Wildlife Fund has helpfully put
a monetary value on them: $24 trillion. No doubt they hope to align
economic incentive with ecological well-being: a laudable motivation. But think
for a moment about the mentality this kind of valuation feeds. It suggests:(1) That money is a valid way to assess the value of
something like an ocean.(2) That we can and should make decisions about the planet
based on the foreseeable financial gains and losses, and therefore...(3) That if we could make more than $24 trillion (say, $48
trillion) by trashing the oceans, then we should do it.(4) That it is possible to foresee and calculate the
contribution of the oceans to human welfare in the first place—that our
knowledge is sufficient to qualify us to even make this valuation.(5) That we can separate out the oceans from the rest of the
planet, as if they were a line item on a spreadsheet independent of the rest.
So conceivably, we could compensate for the loss of the oceans with more from
some other revenue stream.(6) That decisions about the oceans should be made based on
the effect on human beings—that the oceans themselves and everything living in
them have no intrinsic worth. What is important is their economic worth—their value
to us.Clearly, this mentality is part of the problem. At this very
moment we are trashing the oceans for the sake of money. I do not know
how many trillions of dollars we are making in the process, but when I read of
ten thousand seals washing up dead on California’s beaches, I know that however
much we are making, it isn’t enough. No amount of money is enough to compensate
for the loss of the sacred.